No one is forcing anyone to move to ext4. The removal is all about removing what is an older (and now duplicate) "driver" for the same filesystem. The ext4 code can transparently handle ext3 so there's no longer any need to keep a separate module for it.
It's still not a given that it's the hardware. It's likely that something is scribbling over the HPET timer. As to whether that's due to faulty hardware or a software bug is still undetermined.
...for me to want to pay to sit in the theatre. With the advent of larger TVs, the "movie theater experience" no longer has a lot going for it -- certainly not enough to justify the price.
I think we can all agree that having these sorts of communications records is a despot's wet dream. The fact that it hasn't been abused yet is immaterial. It's too tempting a tool for those with the wrong motives.
Why would anyone believe anything that Obama or NSA lackeys say at this point? It's too late for that. Obama's successor is going to have a huge credibility gap to bridge...
What government will control it? City? County? State? Federal?
I think in practice, it wouldn't make much difference either way, but splitting them up this way would likely be less disruptive since these companies already have trucks, linemen, etc that maintain this infrastructure now. By just splitting up the company those "assets" would naturally flow to the company maintaining the lines. A government takeover would be more "messy" and would probably involve a lot more court battles.
Also, there is something of a precedent for this sort of arrangement. Electricity is usually provided by a local monopoly provider, and the state/local utility commission generally sets the rules for how it's run. ISPs are generally beholden to the PUC as well in the current situation. This would just reduce the part that the PUC runs while allowing free market competition for the rest of the company.
Unfortunately, I don't forsee our current crop of govt. officials having the stones to do anything like this anytime soon.
I don't think a government run utility would be better than what we have today, and would likely be worse. What would be better? What should have been done in the original 1996 laws:
Force the telcos and cable companies to break up.
Really, it's as simple as that...
The main problem with the current situation is that there is near-zero competition. At best you have "competition" between two ILECs (cable and telco). In some cases they will "lease" their lines to competitors, but who wants to be in a business where you're the customer of your main competitor? That's guaranteed not to go well.
So in my "dream" solution...
Last-mile providers would be a regulated monopoly (duopoly I guess in the case where there is both twisted-pair and coax) that would just be in charge of the cabling and infrastructure between actual customers and the "central office". They would then lease the lines to "dialtone" (bandwidth?) providers at rates set by the local public utility commission, but would be barred from providing any content on those lines.
That would set up the situation such that multiple companies could compete based on the services that they could provide to customers and price.
I'm not holding my breath for such an outbreak of sanity though...;)
You're assuming that the customer had the ability to wipe the drive after it failed. If it was defective then it's quite likely not to be the case.
This sounds an awful lot like someone returned the drive either mistakenly thinking it was defective, or after hitting some sort of intermittent failure with it. NewEgg (or the HD vendor) then "tested" it and stuck it back on the shelf without wiping it. Or maybe they replaced some of the solid-state components and called it a day.
Either way, I'd be very suspicious about putting my data on it. It certainly wasn't tested well after being "fixed" at the very least.
> Oh, and it's an inevitable result of laissez faire policies
Nonsense...
It's more the inevitable result of giving those same banks the power to print money as they see fit. With a commodity-backed currency, the banks couldn't do this as easily.
Note that this is still an income tax -- not a wealth tax. Those who are already wealthy can and will always game this such that they report little income, thereby preserving their wealth. If necessary, they'll just keep their money offshore.
If he had any sense, he'd offer an amnesty to the wealthy. Allow them to repatriate their funds from overseas at a reduced tax rate so that money comes back to the US. The money the treasury makes on that smaller percentage would still be more than the zero they get from it today.
Sure, but will that fact come out in the patent examination? Or will the person with the unpatented prior art be subject to lawsuits from Mr. First-to-file? I'm not a patent attorney, so I think this is a legitimate question...
For instance, suppose I "invent" an algorithm in some software I write. I use that algorithm but consider it obvious or just don't bother to patent it. Then, a year later someone else independently "invents" the same algorithm and decides to patent it. That person then discovers my use of it and sues. Am I likely to have to pay patent royalties since I neglected to file a patent when I originally invented it?
What often happens is that someone "invents" something and doesn't bother to patent it because it's obvious. Then someone comes along later and does file a patent for the invention, turns around and sues the person who originally invented it. First-to-file now means that if you don't recognize something as an "invention" and patent it when you come up with the idea, you can get screwed later.
There are also other concerns than the context switch overhead...particularly when dealing with filesystems or data storage devices.
For instance, suppose part of your userspace daemon gets swapped out, and you now need to upcall to userspace. That part that got paged out then has to be paged back in. If memory is tight, then the kernel may have to free some memory, and it may decide to flush out dirty data to the filesystem or device that is dependent on the userspace daemon. At that point, you're effectively deadlocked.
Most of those sorts of problems can be overcome with careful coding and making sure the important parts of the daemon are mlocked, but you do have to be careful and it's not always straightforward to do that.
I assume you're talking about client-side performance? If so, then yes it should be much better in RHEL6.
FWIW, The NFS tools don't really do much once you've got the filesystem mounted. (Ok, that's not 100% true with NFSv4 or Kerberized NFS but it is for the most part). Performance problems like this are generally in the kernel. I've got a patchset queued up to try and improve NFS write performance in RHEL5, but it probably won't go in until 5.7.
See this page if you want to test out what I have queued up so far. It's still pretty rough, but the results so far are quite promising:
If you have a support contract, you should open a support case on this. Typically, performance problems are all about numbers so if you can quantify the problems you're seeing then we should be able to help.
...that can survive being turned into a MMORPG. Most developers tend to think that making a game into a MMOG adds value, but I tend to think it's the reverse.
Not exactly the same but my current gripe with my satellite provider (DirecTV) is that I bought one of their HD channel packages, and a number of the channels that are listed as HD channels never actually have any HD programs on them. They're all standard def. The Disney channel, for instance is listed as a high def channel, but I've never seen a single high-def program on it (I even surfed the channel guide through several days to see if anything ever did).
Total fraudulent BS...
I'd drop 'em like a hot potato tomorrow but the wife is addicted to the crap that comes on there...
The bill moves the patent system from a "first-to-invent" to a "first-to-file" system, but in another nod to large universities, the committee clarified a grace period on filing patent applications for inventors who disclose or publish inventions in advance of seeking a patent.
Does this mean that prior art can no longer invalidate a patent if the creator of the prior art never filed for one?
The GPL is a distribution license. My understanding is that the person distributing the software gets to decide under which version of the GPL they are distributing it.
Yep. Apologies to anyone who's read this before, but here's a post I made a few months ago. This describes the *real* net neutrality that this country needs:
------------[snip]-----------------
I'm all for net neutrality, but not in the form currently being campaigned for here and in congress. There is virtually no way that any net neutrality law that gets pushed through congress would be a good thing for consumers.
Here's what needs to happen...
The big problem in the US is that there is no competition between broadband providers. In most places, if you're lucky, you have a choice between DSL and Cable. That usually means getting service from a monopoly telco or a monopoly cable provider. Sure, there are companies like Earthlink that sell broadband services, but they have the uncomfortable position of having to be both the customers and competitors of the monopoly providers. This is never a good arrangement.
For true net neutrality, we need to divorce the companies that own the copper and fiber (local loop) from the ones providing dialtone. This means breaking up the monopoly providers into 2 or more entities each. One monopoly company that owns/services/maintains the wires, and one company that rents these lines from the monopoly provider and provides dialtone. The first one is regulated as any monopoly should be. The second is essentially a peer with all other dialtone providers.
This would put all the dialtone providers in the US on an equal footing, and give some serious incentive for them to add value since changing broadband provider wouldn't necessarily mean dealing with a company that has to buy stuff from their competitor.
There is clear precedent for this. Look at the deregulation of long distance in the 80's.
If we could ever make this happen in the current regulatory environment, then all this net neutrality stuff would go by the wayside. Any provider that wanted to pull this garbage of trying to charge both ends for traffic on a pipe would be writing out their own corporate suicide note, since people would just drop their inferior service.
QED (except for the part of overriding the lobbies of the monopoly companies)
I'm all for net neutrality, but not in the form currently being campaigned for here and in congress. There is virtually no way that any net neutrality law that gets pushed through congress would be a good thing for consumers.
Here's what needs to happen...
The big problem in the US is that there is no competition between broadband providers. In most places, if you're lucky, you have a choice between DSL and Cable. That usually means getting service from a monopoly telco or a monopoly cable provider. Sure, there are companies like Earthlink that sell broadband services, but they have the uncomfortable position of having to be both the customers and competitors of the monopoly providers. This is never a good arrangement.
For true net neutrality, we need to divorce the companies that own the copper and fiber (local loop) from the ones providing dialtone. This means breaking up the monopoly providers into 2 or more entities each. One monopoly company that owns/services/maintains the wires, and one company that rents these lines from the monopoly provider and provides dialtone. The first one is regulated as any monopoly should be. The second is essentially a peer with all other dialtone providers.
This would put all the dialtone providers in the US on an equal footing, and give some serious incentive for them to add value since changing broadband provider wouldn't necessarily mean dealing with a company that has to buy stuff from their competitor.
There is clear precedent for this. Look at the deregulation of long distance in the 80's.
If we could ever make this happen in the current regulatory environment, then all this net neutrality stuff would go by the wayside. Any provider that wanted to pull this garbage of trying to charge both ends for traffic on a pipe would be writing out their own corporate suicide note, since people would just drop their inferior service.
QED (except for the part of overriding the lobbies of the monopoly companies)
One of the big problems I've always had with most DNS management frontends is that they seem to all need a separate database of some sort, and then they try to sync up the contents of the zonefiles with what's in that database.
This wreaks all sorts of unholy havoc if you do any sort of changes outside of that interface (like a DHCP server that updates DNS).
I wrote a small app to manage DNS for my home that plays well with DHCP, though I'll confess I have no reports of anyone using it for a large site:
It simply uses zone transfers for reads and DDNS for writes. Note that is not a "do all" tool, it's geared toward giving you a frontend to the most common tasks (adding and removing records). Things like creating a new zone still need to be done by hand.
It also allows you to limit users to updating only particular zones.
Slashdot Mirror
No one is forcing anyone to move to ext4. The removal is all about removing what is an older (and now duplicate) "driver" for the same filesystem. The ext4 code can transparently handle ext3 so there's no longer any need to keep a separate module for it.
It's still not a given that it's the hardware. It's likely that something is scribbling over the HPET timer. As to whether that's due to faulty hardware or a software bug is still undetermined.
Random memory corruption is oh so painful. :(
...for me to want to pay to sit in the theatre. With the advent of larger TVs, the "movie theater experience" no longer has a lot going for it -- certainly not enough to justify the price.
Doesn't LOVEINT count?
Even if it doesn't, that's not the point.
I think we can all agree that having these sorts of communications records is a despot's wet dream. The fact that it hasn't been abused yet is immaterial. It's too tempting a tool for those with the wrong motives.
Why would anyone believe anything that Obama or NSA lackeys say at this point? It's too late for that. Obama's successor is going to have a huge credibility gap to bridge...
What government will control it? City? County? State? Federal?
I think in practice, it wouldn't make much difference either way, but splitting them up this way would likely be less disruptive since these companies already have trucks, linemen, etc that maintain this infrastructure now. By just splitting up the company those "assets" would naturally flow to the company maintaining the lines. A government takeover would be more "messy" and would probably involve a lot more court battles.
Also, there is something of a precedent for this sort of arrangement. Electricity is usually provided by a local monopoly provider, and the state/local utility commission generally sets the rules for how it's run. ISPs are generally beholden to the PUC as well in the current situation. This would just reduce the part that the PUC runs while allowing free market competition for the rest of the company.
Unfortunately, I don't forsee our current crop of govt. officials having the stones to do anything like this anytime soon.
...you know the rest.
I don't think a government run utility would be better than what we have today, and would likely be worse. What would be better? What should have been done in the original 1996 laws:
Force the telcos and cable companies to break up.
Really, it's as simple as that...
The main problem with the current situation is that there is near-zero competition. At best you have "competition" between two ILECs (cable and telco). In some cases they will "lease" their lines to competitors, but who wants to be in a business where you're the customer of your main competitor? That's guaranteed not to go well.
So in my "dream" solution...
Last-mile providers would be a regulated monopoly (duopoly I guess in the case where there is both twisted-pair and coax) that would just be in charge of the cabling and infrastructure between actual customers and the "central office". They would then lease the lines to "dialtone" (bandwidth?) providers at rates set by the local public utility commission, but would be barred from providing any content on those lines.
That would set up the situation such that multiple companies could compete based on the services that they could provide to customers and price.
I'm not holding my breath for such an outbreak of sanity though... ;)
You're assuming that the customer had the ability to wipe the drive after it failed. If it was defective then it's quite likely not to be the case.
This sounds an awful lot like someone returned the drive either mistakenly thinking it was defective, or after hitting some sort of intermittent failure with it. NewEgg (or the HD vendor) then "tested" it and stuck it back on the shelf without wiping it. Or maybe they replaced some of the solid-state components and called it a day.
Either way, I'd be very suspicious about putting my data on it. It certainly wasn't tested well after being "fixed" at the very least.
> Oh, and it's an inevitable result of laissez faire policies
Nonsense...
It's more the inevitable result of giving those same banks the power to print money as they see fit. With a commodity-backed currency, the banks couldn't do this as easily.
Note that this is still an income tax -- not a wealth tax. Those who are already wealthy can and will always game this such that they report little income, thereby preserving their wealth. If necessary, they'll just keep their money offshore.
If he had any sense, he'd offer an amnesty to the wealthy. Allow them to repatriate their funds from overseas at a reduced tax rate so that money comes back to the US. The money the treasury makes on that smaller percentage would still be more than the zero they get from it today.
Sure, but will that fact come out in the patent examination? Or will the person with the unpatented prior art be subject to lawsuits from Mr. First-to-file? I'm not a patent attorney, so I think this is a legitimate question...
For instance, suppose I "invent" an algorithm in some software I write. I use that algorithm but consider it obvious or just don't bother to patent it. Then, a year later someone else independently "invents" the same algorithm and decides to patent it. That person then discovers my use of it and sues. Am I likely to have to pay patent royalties since I neglected to file a patent when I originally invented it?
On the flip side...
What often happens is that someone "invents" something and doesn't bother to patent it because it's obvious. Then someone comes along later and does file a patent for the invention, turns around and sues the person who originally invented it. First-to-file now means that if you don't recognize something as an "invention" and patent it when you come up with the idea, you can get screwed later.
"Let's ensure that only those willing to break the law will have access to these tools."
Bev Purdue is a Democrat.
There are also other concerns than the context switch overhead...particularly when dealing with filesystems or data storage devices.
For instance, suppose part of your userspace daemon gets swapped out, and you now need to upcall to userspace. That part that got paged out then has to be paged back in. If memory is tight, then the kernel may have to free some memory, and it may decide to flush out dirty data to the filesystem or device that is dependent on the userspace daemon. At that point, you're effectively deadlocked.
Most of those sorts of problems can be overcome with careful coding and making sure the important parts of the daemon are mlocked, but you do have to be careful and it's not always straightforward to do that.
I assume you're talking about client-side performance? If so, then yes it should be much better in RHEL6.
FWIW, The NFS tools don't really do much once you've got the filesystem mounted. (Ok, that's not 100% true with NFSv4 or Kerberized NFS but it is for the most part). Performance problems like this are generally in the kernel. I've got a patchset queued up to try and improve NFS write performance in RHEL5, but it probably won't go in until 5.7.
See this page if you want to test out what I have queued up so far. It's still pretty rough, but the results so far are quite promising:
http://people.redhat.com/jlayton/
If you have a support contract, you should open a support case on this. Typically, performance problems are all about numbers so if you can quantify the problems you're seeing then we should be able to help.
...that can survive being turned into a MMORPG. Most developers tend to think that making a game into a MMOG adds value, but I tend to think it's the reverse.
Not exactly the same but my current gripe with my satellite provider (DirecTV) is that I bought one of their HD channel packages, and a number of the channels that are listed as HD channels never actually have any HD programs on them. They're all standard def. The Disney channel, for instance is listed as a high def channel, but I've never seen a single high-def program on it (I even surfed the channel guide through several days to see if anything ever did).
Total fraudulent BS...
I'd drop 'em like a hot potato tomorrow but the wife is addicted to the crap that comes on there...
*sigh*
Thus spake the article:
The bill moves the patent system from a "first-to-invent" to a "first-to-file" system, but in another nod to large universities, the committee clarified a grace period on filing patent applications for inventors who disclose or publish inventions in advance of seeking a patent.
Does this mean that prior art can no longer invalidate a patent if the creator of the prior art never filed for one?
The GPL is a distribution license. My understanding is that the person distributing the software gets to decide under which version of the GPL they are distributing it.
Yep. Apologies to anyone who's read this before, but here's a post I made a few months ago. This describes the *real* net neutrality that this country needs:
------------[snip]-----------------
I'm all for net neutrality, but not in the form currently being campaigned for here and in congress. There is virtually no way that any net neutrality law that gets pushed through congress would be a good thing for consumers.
Here's what needs to happen...
The big problem in the US is that there is no competition between broadband providers. In most places, if you're lucky, you have a choice between DSL and Cable. That usually means getting service from a monopoly telco or a monopoly cable provider. Sure, there are companies like Earthlink that sell broadband services, but they have the uncomfortable position of having to be both the customers and competitors of the monopoly providers. This is never a good arrangement.
For true net neutrality, we need to divorce the companies that own the copper and fiber (local loop) from the ones providing dialtone. This means breaking up the monopoly providers into 2 or more entities each. One monopoly company that owns/services/maintains the wires, and one company that rents these lines from the monopoly provider and provides dialtone. The first one is regulated as any monopoly should be. The second is essentially a peer with all other dialtone providers.
This would put all the dialtone providers in the US on an equal footing, and give some serious incentive for them to add value since changing broadband provider wouldn't necessarily mean dealing with a company that has to buy stuff from their competitor.
There is clear precedent for this. Look at the deregulation of long distance in the 80's.
If we could ever make this happen in the current regulatory environment, then all this net neutrality stuff would go by the wayside. Any provider that wanted to pull this garbage of trying to charge both ends for traffic on a pipe would be writing out their own corporate suicide note, since people would just drop their inferior service.
QED (except for the part of overriding the lobbies of the monopoly companies)
I'm all for net neutrality, but not in the form currently being campaigned for here and in congress. There is virtually no way that any net neutrality law that gets pushed through congress would be a good thing for consumers.
Here's what needs to happen...
The big problem in the US is that there is no competition between broadband providers. In most places, if you're lucky, you have a choice between DSL and Cable. That usually means getting service from a monopoly telco or a monopoly cable provider. Sure, there are companies like Earthlink that sell broadband services, but they have the uncomfortable position of having to be both the customers and competitors of the monopoly providers. This is never a good arrangement.
For true net neutrality, we need to divorce the companies that own the copper and fiber (local loop) from the ones providing dialtone. This means breaking up the monopoly providers into 2 or more entities each. One monopoly company that owns/services/maintains the wires, and one company that rents these lines from the monopoly provider and provides dialtone. The first one is regulated as any monopoly should be. The second is essentially a peer with all other dialtone providers.
This would put all the dialtone providers in the US on an equal footing, and give some serious incentive for them to add value since changing broadband provider wouldn't necessarily mean dealing with a company that has to buy stuff from their competitor.
There is clear precedent for this. Look at the deregulation of long distance in the 80's.
If we could ever make this happen in the current regulatory environment, then all this net neutrality stuff would go by the wayside. Any provider that wanted to pull this garbage of trying to charge both ends for traffic on a pipe would be writing out their own corporate suicide note, since people would just drop their inferior service.
QED (except for the part of overriding the lobbies of the monopoly companies)
Gotta love this comic strip:
http://www.fatalexception.org/action_item.html
One of the big problems I've always had with most DNS management frontends is that they seem to all need a separate database of some sort, and then they try to sync up the contents of the zonefiles with what's in that database.
This wreaks all sorts of unholy havoc if you do any sort of changes outside of that interface (like a DHCP server that updates DNS).
I wrote a small app to manage DNS for my home that plays well with DHCP, though I'll confess I have no reports of anyone using it for a large site:
http://www.poochiereds.net/dnsdusty/
It simply uses zone transfers for reads and DDNS for writes. Note that is not a "do all" tool, it's geared toward giving you a frontend to the most common tasks (adding and removing records). Things like creating a new zone still need to be done by hand.
It also allows you to limit users to updating only particular zones.